Tuesday, August 11, 2015

It’s been a while since Samuel Roberts was called upon to save mankind, and he’s getting restless. His girlfriend Susan thinks he’s a danger junkie, and he’s worried he has a hero complex. He’s back to his usual small-town lawyerly duties in Champaign-Urbana, handling divorces and helping people beat DUI raps. But then a young fraternity pledge calls. During an initiation ceremony he witnessed the live sacrifice of a young woman, but he had so much alcohol in his system that no one believes him. Except Sam. Lately Egyptian lore has been creeping into his life, his dreams, and his movie preferences, and he’s pretty sure he knows why. Evil is knocking on his door again.

Is the call welcome? Why can’t Sam be satisfied with his comfortable legal practice and gorgeous redheaded girlfriend? Maybe it’s because he knows that, as inadequate as he may feel to the task, he and his friend Bob may be humanity’s only hope against ancient supernatural forces combined with modern genetic engineering. Come hell or high water. Or in this case, the underworld or subterranean pyramids.

The Fraternity of the Soul Eater is the third book in the Samuel Roberts Thriller series, which began with Cocaine Zombies and continued with Ruler of Demons.

My Review

DNA experimentation always makes for quite an entertaining premise.

Author Scott A. Lerner does it one better by having a mad scientist, Dr. Oaks, try to manipulate our genetic code so that he can bring the Egyptian gods back to life.

How's he been doing it? By implanting half human / half animal fetuses into the wombs of the unsuspecting women he imprisons in his top secret laboratory. There's just one problem—none of the monstrous offspring have survived their tumultuous entry into the world.

So it's back to the drawing board, and our hero, Sam Roberts, becomes guinea pig number one after getting too close to investigating the good doctor's work. He has Sam beat up and captured by members of Zeta Ankh Iota, the secret society that's funding his horrific tests. Now his plan is to inject Sam's body with a chromosome cocktail so that he can manipulate the double helixes of a live host.

In order to escape, Sam is forced to fight his way out of a steel cage by cutting off a guard's hand. Yet committing such an act of barbarism really bothers him.

"I had just murdered a man who might have had nothing to do with the plot to take over the world. A man whose only crime—as far as [I] knew—was to bring [me] dinner."

Sam then takes the severed appendage with him, using the fingerprint to open the security doors that are holding him hostage—in an underground pyramid that just so happens to be in, of all places, suburban Illinois.

The evildoers are out to awaken the Soul Eater, the Egyptian god, Ammit, who is part human, part lion, part hippopotamus. This imposing figure is said to dwell in the underworld, waiting to devour the human hearts of the recently deceased, the ones deemed too heavy on the scales of justice. Now Dr. Oaks wants to bring the Soul Eater into the dimension of the living by turning an ordinary human like himself into a god.

Dr. Oaks explains his reasoning this way:

"The modern world is a mess. A mess that mere mortals cannot clean up. If we allow the ancient gods to help us through me, their representative on earth, we can create a new world order."

But to escape this torture chamber of craziness, Sam must resort to doing a lot of terrible things. He literally has to kill his way out. He's never taken a human life before, and a sort of darkness falls over his soul. Without or without a change in his DNA, he feels like he is not the same person as before he entered the pyramid.

But is Sam damaged beyond repair? He's seen a lot of terrible things from a cobra coiled inside the hollowed out body of a young girl to one of his fellow captives blowing off part of a man's skull. Sam willingly takes down anyone blocking his path to freedom, and it makes him ponder the fate of his own soul.

"The kill was cold and horrible. The fact that [I] could do something so nightmarish said a lot about what [I] had become. [My] humanity, [my] soul, [was] so damaged that [it] certainly would weigh more than a feather. [I] would be denied the afterworld."

But he knows what Dr. Oaks is trying to do can't be done. His efforts to merge the supposed life force of a god into the body of a man are nothing but futile.

Because deep down Sam believes in his heart that:

"All the power and money in the world can't bring [anyone] back from the dead."

Author and attorney Scott A. Lerner resides in Champaign, Illinois. He obtained his undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and went on to obtain his Juris Doctor degree from the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign. He is currently a sole practitioner in Champaign, Illinois. The majority of his law practice focuses on the fields of criminal law and family law. Lerner’s first novel and the first Samuel Roberts Thriller, Cocaine Zombies, won a bronze medal in the mystery/cozy/noir category of the 2013 Independent Publisher (IPPY) Awards. The second book in the series is Ruler of Demons. The Fraternity of the Soul Eater is book 3. Book 4, The Wiccan Witch of the Midwest, will be released on Halloween, 2015.